udev (without systemd) fails to find devices

I recently upgraded the sid installation on an i386 machine. With
udev upgraded to 239-8, many devices are no longer detected during
boot, e.g. usb, network card, video, audio. I also have a
not-upgraded buster partition on the same machine -- a large
portion of its dmesg output is simply missing from sid's dmesg.
The kernel was also upgraded (to 4.18.0-1), but booting the old
kernel (4.17.0-3) also fails. So it appears to me to be a bug in
udev, possibly connected to my not running systemd. I haven't
seen that anyone else is affected, so wanted to check here before
submitting a bug report. Anyone else? Any other ideas?
Thanks..
--
Bill Brelsford
wbrels@xxxxxxxx